If you've ever helped someone move furniture, you know it takes coordination -- simultaneously pushing or pulling and reacting based on what your helper is doing. That makes it an ideal problem to examine collaboration between robots, said Andrew Barth, a doctoral student in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. "It's a good metaphor for cooperation," Barth said. In the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems Lab of UC aerospace engineering professor Ou Ma, student researchers developed artificial intelligence to train robots to work together to move a couch -- or in this case a long rod that served as a stand-in -- around two obstacles and through a narrow door in computer simulations. "We made it a little more difficult on ourselves. We want to accomplish the task with as little communication as possible among the robots," student Barth said.

In 2018, Google unveiled Duplex, an artificial intelligence-powered assistant that sounds eerily human-like, complete with'umms' and'ahs' that are designed to make the conversation more natural. The demo had Duplex call a salon to schedule a haircut and then call a restaurant to make a reservation. As Google's CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated, the system at Google's I/O (input/output) developer conference, the crowd cheered, hailing the technological achievement. Indeed, this represented a big leap toward developing AI voice assistants that can pass the "Turing Test," which requires machines to be able to hold conversations while being completely indistinguishable from humans. But not everyone was so enthusiastic.

Cars are getting smarter and more capable. They're even starting to drive themselves, a little. They're all for putting better tech on the road, but automakers are selling systems like Tesla's Autopilot, or Nissan's Pro Pilot Assist, with the implied promise that they'll make driving easier and safer, and a new study is the latest to say that may not always be the case. More worryingly, drivers think these systems are far more capable than they really are. Euro NCAP, an independent European car safety assessment group (similar to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the US,) has just released the results of its first round of tests of 10 new cars with driver assistance technologies.

It's a new year, which means new video games to stoke our excitement. This year, we also get two more home consoles, Nintendo's Switch and Microsoft's Project Scorpio, a souped-up version of the Xbox One supporting native 4K resolutions and virtual reality. While we wait for fresh hardware, let's look ahead to the software players will likely pine for in 2017. Details: This side-scrolling action game is inspired by classic cartoons of the 1930s, even adopting similar animation techniques. Lead characters Cuphead and Mugman make a deal with the devil, and must perform his bidding through a variety of levels played either solo or cooperatively with friends.